Popular Music Histories

The singer-songwriter has been the focus of most discourses on aesthetic values in Italian popular music since his appearance in the early 1960s; an ideology of authorship has shaped the way audiences have made sense of popular music in Italy since then. The perceived connection between the canzone d’autore genre and literature authenticated the former as the quintessential Italian “art song”, and the cantautori (singer-songwriters) as “true poets” (Tomatis, 2013). Authorship as a form of authentication is not to be found in Italian popular music only. Yet, its centrality in the history of Italian canzone convincingly points it out as a national peculiarity.
Despite the existence of a feminine counterpart to the cantautore, both in the Italian language and Italian popular music (the cantautrice), the canzone d’autore has always been a men’s genre. Male singer-songwriters are unquestionably the norm in the canzone d’autore, while female are deviations from that norm. Even if a small number of records by female singer-songwriters were released during the 1960s and 1970s, a tradition of women’s canzone d’autore only established itself in the last decades, and cantautrici are still a minority.
Although the canzone d’autore is arguably the most common topic in the field of Italian popular music studies, no attention at all has been paid to this imbalance.
This chapter should not be read neither as a (possibly poor) attempt of writing a feminist history of the canzone d’autore, nor as an (even poorer) effort to provide a feminist account on Italian popular music history. Yet, analytical tools developed by feminist historians can be usefully employed for the purpose of a more attentive and conscious methodology for the study of popular music histories (Scott, 1988), and especially to shed light on how gender plays a role in the way people organize music, also through the formulation of value judgements which are gender-biased. Genre conventions (Fabbri, 2012) can be structured around gender, and include gender positions.

In the titles and rationale of online activities devoted to popular music there is a promiscuous deployment of terms such as history, heritage, memory, community, curation, archive and indeed nostalgia.This chapter explores the scope and meaning of these sites and places this activity in the context of the ‘archival turn’. It then considers how this archiving and memory work might be understood in relation to the way in which popular music is imbued with a broad historical sensibility. This discussion entails some exploration of the political economy of online music archives and memory work in the context of the digital turn which might also prompt reflections on the field opened up in this book and wider heritage practices.

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